While preparing for my upcoming 2-Day Soap Making Boot Camp, I began to realize that there are some essential oils that are crucial to me for Cold Process Soap Making. Even though I occasionally use oils that are not on this list, without these oils I would be hard pressed to make amazing soap at an affordable price.

The reasons that I use/choose these oils time and time again is…

1) they smell great in CP soap,
2) they are reasonably priced and I can afford to buy a 16 ounce bottle of them, and
3) many of them blend well with each other, creating dozens or more of possible combinations.

Refer to “my list” above about for how much is recommended to use per pound of oil/fat.
How many pounds (of oil/fat) does your recipe have?
Let’s say you are making a 4-pound batch of oil/fats (fyi – 4 pounds = 64 ounces)
You multiply 4 x the amount of E.O. recommended.

To demonstrate, I’ll use Anise & Lavender.
Anise is recommended at .5 per pound of oil/fat.
So… 4 (lbs of oil) x .5 = 2.0 ounces of Anise (if you were using only Anise for the entire 4-lb batch).
and 4 (lbs of oil) x .7 = 2.8 ounces of Lavender (if you were using only Lavender)
Since you are using a combination of oils, divide each by 2.
So for Anise, it’s 2 divided by 2 = 1 (ounce of anise for the whole batch, in combo with lavender)
So 2.8 divided by 2 = 1.4 (ounces of lavender for the whole batch, in combo with anise).So the end result for an Anise & Lavender Soap would be:1 ounce of Anise AND 1.4 ounces of Lavender

Remember – these are guidelines for Cold Process Soap Making only and this is only a place to start. After making your first batch, if it comes out smelling more like one oil and you want it the other way around, feel free to adjust the amounts until you find exactly the scent you are looking for.

30 Comments

This is such great information! What is the rule of thumb for essential oils in hot process? Would I use the rebatch option on your calculator? I know it says with hot process you don’t have to use as much fragrance. I don’t want to waste any precious oils if I don’t have to! Thanks so much!

We typically keep our hot process recipes at the same fragrance/essential oil rate as our cold process recipe but if you are worried about losing some of the scent/properties, I’d use the lower amount that you find on the fragrance calculator and then go up from there until you find that sweet spot that works for you!

French milling is actually just a fancy way of saying either hand-milled or rebatch. Rebatch is a process of soap-making where a cold process soap bar has already been made and either the soaper doesn’t like how it turned out and wants to ‘redo’ it using the rebatch method.

Many soapers prefer rebatch because you do not have to handle lye during the process of making your soap. If you are interested in starting rebatch here are a few tutorials you can check out:

Last, but not least, we have something on Bramble Berry’s website called the fragrance calculator which calculates safe usage rates for all our fragrance and essential oils. Are you need to do is put in the amount (by ounces or grams) and type of product you are making and choose which essential oil you’d like to add and it will give you a safe usage rate range.

Lavender Essential Oil has always worked great for us in Cold Process Soap. Sometimes swell and heating up of the soap is caused by soaping at too high of temperatures.What was the recipe you were using, I’d love to help you troubleshoot what happened! =)

Generally we use more fragrance or essential oil when making cold process soap (about 1 pounce per pound, give or take a little bit). For rebatch and melt and pour we recommend 1/4-1/2 ounce per pound of soap.

I use Anise to make fisherman soap…I just made a fennel,lemongrass, rosemary soap with 2 jars of smushed baby carrots, and poppyseeds, it smells so good, I want to make more fennl soaps, my entire kitchen smells divine….like a nice clean scent.
I always love lavender….

I just started making cold process soap. The first batch I made turned out wonderful. However I did not add scent to it because I plan to french mill the soap. I will add these blends to see how they are. I took notes on this blog. Thank you.

Thanks so much for this post. I’m really new to soap making and I appreciate experiential advice such as this. Wish I had the chance to attend workshops too, but they’re rare, if not non-existent in this part of the world.

I wish I lived closer too! There needs to be something like this in Geogria. I appreciate the advice regarding EOs; It’s helpful to have a practical “must have” list. Also, I too am looking for a mold like the one pictured.

This is great. I often forget how much essential oil I need to use. I’m constantly referencing, which I guess isn’t a terrible thing. My fave essential oils, not to sound generic, is lavender. I find that it mixes well with rosemary and lemon.

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